What You Can Learn From Top Marketers
I don’t know about you, but I feel like there is a scarcity of good marketing today. What do I mean “good marketing?” You know the kind of marketing that sticks with you and drives you to take action. The only marketing that has really moved me in the last couple of years has been from Apple. How do I know? I own 3 ipods.
You might be thinking to yourself that it’s more the product that drives behavior than the marketing, and when it comes to the ipod I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I would argue that in some ways, the marketing has to be even better than it does with your run of the mill product.
Apple has maintained a certain level of success with their marketing and now that marketing must not only tie together with previous marketing campaigns, but convince current customers that their current products are no longer sufficient.
It appears that this is done, not through slight of hand, but by showing you what you can’t do with your current device. By illustrating this in a manner that is contradictory to your current satisfaction, it does make you feel like your ipod – which was fine until a moment ago has suddenly become inadequate. To me, that’s really good marketing.
So what can be learned from the tens of millions that Apple spends on advertising every year? I think the answer to that question is to work in lock step with your product development team to showcase developments and tap the emotions of those using your products. When I use my iTouch, I feel empowered, cool, and complete. I wouldn’t have reached that conclusion without the help of marketing to get me there.
The lesson that I’ve learned is that marketing, if done correctly, helps us to define how we feel about a product. Once you have prospects and customers attaching emotions to your products, you develop loyal customers. The next time that you’re thinking about a marketing campaign, consider how you want your customers to feel about your product.
Manage the entire purchase decision process in order to consistently manage the experience to reinforce or produce these desired feelings. Once you’ve been able to do that successfully, your creative, marketing messages and promotions should be relatively easy to produce. Now that’s what I call good marketing.
By Michael Fleischner
